What Happened:
Zendesk is focusing its partner marketing strategy on self-service experiences that enable partners to customize messaging while maintaining brand consistency.
The company recently launched customizable collateral that provides pre-written solution messaging with designated spaces for partners to add their own expertise, eliminating the need for extensive training or resource hunting.
Avalos emphasized that partners shouldn't sell Zendesk directly but instead "sell yourself powered by Zendesk," positioning the software as a force multiplier for partners' existing customer relationships rather than the primary value proposition.
These insights were discussed during Avalos’s conversation on the Partnerships Unraveled podcast by Channext.
Our Take:
Partnership leaders frequently inherit the expectation that partners will sell products the company can't sell itself. Avalos firmly pushes back on this, asserting that if the core sales story is unclear, if the ICP is fuzzy, if customer value isn’t well understood, partners will expose them at scale. This is why she insists companies must first be able to sell their own solution consistently before pushing it through a channel.
This ladders up to Avalos’s core strategy that partners sell themselves, powered by Zendesk. This keeps partners in control of the customer relationship and makes the motion easier to repeat.
The self-service portal strategy is particularly interesting. Rather than treating all partners identically, Avalos describes building resources that work across the spectrum. Less-resourced partners can grab pre-made materials and "slap their logo" on them, while sophisticated partners with full marketing teams can extract approved messaging and integrate it into their own templates. This tiered approach acknowledges that partner maturity varies wildly, and rigid programs inevitably exclude segments of the ecosystem.
A view of Zendesk’s Partner Program page.
Perhaps most valuable is Avalos's insight about using partners as early feedback mechanisms. "If there's a problem to be found, a partner will find it," she observed. Rather than viewing this as purely negative, she wishes more companies would leverage partners as "trusted advisors in your network" who can spot gaps and provide fresh perspective on solution positioning, especially valuable given partners' exposure to competing programs and technologies.
Listen to the full interview with Avalos here.